End Of An Era: By The Numbers

After spending the last month publishing our best-of lists of the last generation, we decided to break down the numbers and see which of the past nine years were the best for gamers, which console had the most exclusive titles appear on our lists, and which publishers delivered the largest amount of great games. Here are our findings.

The Rise and Fall

To gather this data, we created a spreadsheet document with all the games, systems, and years for every game that made one of our overall console best-of lists and the various genre best-of lists (like Best Shooters of the Generation, etc.).

We sorted by year to look at how the best games of this generation were dispersed throughout the years. A couple of things to note: One, obviously 2014 is not over yet, and there could be more games added during the busy holiday season. Two, some games were released for Wii but are not counted on our best-of lists. For example, sports titles that were released for Wii but were not comparable in terms of graphics, features, and online play with the PS3 and Xbox 360 version are excluded for being inferior products.

As you can see by the graph above, the numbers tell a familiar tale – that of a console generation's rise and fall. As you might expect, the generation started out slow, then gathered steam through the middle years, gradually petering out as publishers and developers started planning for new consoles. As it turns out, 2008 through 2010 were the salad days filled with amazing titles like BioShock, Left 4 Dead, Borderlands, and Red Dead Redemption. Below is the complete list of games that made our End of an Era best-of lists, sorted by year. It's a nice walk down memory lane.